Gender and the lived body experience of academic work during COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The rapid transition to online teaching in response to Covid-19 presented unprecedented challenges for academic communities. Staff had vastly different experiences of engaging with technology, and these experiences are shaped by factors including gender, (dis)ability, socio-economic resources and caring responsibilities. We report findings from an intersectional interview examination of how 412 staff in a large London-based university adapted to teaching and researching from home at the beginning of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we construct grounded theory around the divisibility of the body, and the conflicts arising from the need to span home and work-life, our findings illustrate how patterns of inequity for women academics converge to construct ways of managing the boundary work of home and work with different degrees of successes. We document how management support and/ or existing expertise were vital to enable women academics to overcome obstacles to equitable work.)